The MCU Phase 3 – The Payoff

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Phase 1: Proving It Could Work |
Phase 2: Finding the Formula |
Phase 3: The Payoff |
Phase 4: The MCU Becomes the MSHEU |
Phase 5: The MCU Pushes the Message |
Phase 6: The Reset

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1. Captain America: Civil War (2016)

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“I could do this all day.”

The best idea of the phase inside a film that can’t deliver it. Two people who have saved the world together disagree about oversight, and both positions are real. That’s more than most of these attempt. What undercuts it’s the machinery required to keep the argument going. The characters change position when the plot needs a fight, the airport sequence exists because a marketing image required it, and the accords are dropped as a subject the moment they’ve served their purpose.

Zemo is the one element that works completely. He has no powers, he wants these people to destroy each other, his reason comes from Sokovia, and he succeeds. The final fight isn’t about saving anybody, it’s a man showing another man a piece of film about his parents, and that scene is the 4 this film earns.

The airport sequence is the most discussed action scene in the franchise and it’s the clearest evidence of the problem. Twelve people fight for fifteen minutes and nobody is trying to hurt anybody.

That produces a sequence with enormous choreography and no stakes at all. It’s a trailer that the film has to build a plot around.

Spider-Man’s introduction sits in the middle of it, and the scene where Stark recruits him in a Queens bedroom is good writing. It’s also a fifteen-minute detour in a film that had two protagonists and an argument to service, and it exists because a separate picture needed launching.

What sinks it below its reputation is that the film decides nothing. The accords are neither vindicated nor overturned, the team splits and reassembles offscreen in the next film, and the consequence of the whole argument is a letter and a phone. A story about a permanent rupture that the characters can repair by post isn’t about a rupture.

This one frustrates me more than anything else on the page, because the argument at its center is worth two hours and the studio traded it for a brawl on a tarmac. I wanted to see one of these men lose something permanent for what he believed. The film gave me a toy commercial and a phone in an envelope.

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2. Doctor Strange (2016)

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“It’s not about you.”

A conventional origin structure carried by an unconventional visual imagination and a good idea about ego.

Strange is arrogant, gifted and destroyed by an accident he caused, and the film is patient about what that does to a surgeon’s hands. The recovery isn’t a training montage toward power, it’s a man being told repeatedly that his problem is that he thinks the universe is about him.

The ending is the reason it holds up. He defeats a cosmic entity by trapping himself in a time loop and dying over and over until it finds him tedious, which is a solution based on stubbornness instead of force, and it’s the only third act in the phase that resolves with an idea.

The visual work is the other reason. Folding cities, mirror dimensions and a sequence of infinite hands remain unlike anything else in the franchise, and the fights are staged as architecture instead of as combat. That gives the picture an identity the rest of the phase lacks.

Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One is doing the film’s real argument. She’s broken her own rules for centuries to stay alive and doesn’t pretend otherwise, and her position, that a person can be right and compromised at once, is more adult than anything else Phase 3 attempts.

The 8 is the highest score in the phase and the film is the least ambitious thing in it. That says something about the rest. It’s a well-made origin story that knows what it is, finishes what it starts, and requires nothing from any other picture.

I’m very fond of this film. The folding cities still delight me, and the time-loop ending is the kind of clever I wish this franchise reached for more often. My reservation is the first act, which runs the origin beats so dutifully that I could set my watch by them.

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3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

► Read the full review of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

“He may have been your father, boy, but he wasn’t your daddy.”

A sequel that chooses a subject instead of a plot, and the subject is fathers. Quill finds his and discovers what he is, Gamora and Nebula work through what Thanos made of them, and Yondu turns out to have been the answer the whole time.

It’s baggier than the first and the colors are louder, and the structural choice to separate the group for most of the running time costs the ensemble chemistry that made the original work.

What it earns is the funeral. Yondu’s arc from comic threat to the only parent in the film is built carefully across two pictures, and the ending is the franchise being sincere without irony for a full sequence, which by 2017 was already rare.

Ego is the phase’s most underrated villain because his plan is secondary to what he is. A being who wants a son, and who killed dozens of his own children when they proved useless, is a kind of horror, and Kurt Russell plays the warmth entirely straight so the reveal plays as betrayal and not as a twist.

The Nebula and Gamora material is the thread that pays off six years later. Two sisters who were made to fight each other by a father who rewarded the winner, and who can’t stop competing even after he’s gone, is a better idea than the film has room for.

A 6 is fair. It’s overlong, the color palette is exhausting, and it separates its ensemble for so much of the running time that the chemistry which made the first film work is largely absent. What it’s instead is a subject, and a subject beats a plot.

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4. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

► Read the full review of Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

“If you’re nothing without the suit, then you shouldn’t have it.”

The right scale for the character, finally. No origin, no city-ending threat, a fifteen-year-old who wants to be taken seriously and a plot about weapons being sold in Queens. Michael Keaton’s Toomes is the best civilian villain the franchise has produced. He’s a salvage contractor put out of business by the cleanup of the Chitauri invasion. That makes him a direct consequence of the first Avengers film, and his grievance is about class and not power. The car scene is the finest sequence in the phase outside Civil War. Two people realize who the other is with no fight, no music and no effects, just a father driving his daughter’s date to a dance while both men understand exactly what’s happening.

Tom Holland is the first screen Peter Parker who’s convincingly fifteen. The physicality is different from his predecessors, all elbows and overcorrection, and the film lets him be bad at this. He gets stuck in a suburb, he can’t find a crime, and the sequence where he’s trapped in a warehouse for hours is the best thing anybody has done with the character.

The Washington Monument sequence is the structural argument for scale. A school trip, an elevator, a friend inside, and a hero who’s afraid of heights. It generates more tension than any city-ending threat in the phase because the audience can hold every element of it at once.

I’d call the 7 right, and the deductions are the franchise obligations. Stark’s presence turns a story about a kid proving himself into a story about a kid seeking approval from a corporation, and the suit with an artificial intelligence in it removes the improvisation that makes the character interesting.

I enjoy this film a great deal, and Keaton in that car is the scene I’d show anybody who says these movies can’t do quiet menace. I dislike Stark hovering over the film with a product line. Let the kid fail on his own and the film would have been better for it.

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5. Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

► Read the full review of Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

“He’s a friend from work!”

Taika Waititi rebuilt the character as a comedy and the result is the most purely enjoyable film in the phase, at the cost of everything the previous two Thor films had established.

The comic instinct is real and the improvisation is loose in a way this franchise rarely permits. Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster, the rock creature, and the gladiator arena all work because Waititi is playing to his own strengths and not to a house style. Weight is what it spends. Asgard’s destruction, Odin’s death and the loss of the hammer all happen inside a film that keeps undercutting itself, so events that should be enormous arrive as setup for the next joke. Enjoyable isn’t free.

Cate Blanchett is doing something the film can’t use. Hela is a conqueror whose father used her and then wrote her out of her own history, and the mural sequence, where the ceiling is repainted to hide what Asgard was built on, is the most interesting political idea in the phase. It gets about four minutes.

The Sakaar material is where the register works completely, because nothing there’s supposed to matter. Goldblum’s Grandmaster, the junk planet and the arena are all played at the same pitch as the jokes, so there’s no dissonance.

It’s a 6, for a film I enjoy more than the number suggests and can’t defend past its own choices. Odin dies on a cliff in a scene played for warmth and then never mentioned again. The hammer is destroyed in the same ten minutes. Two enormous events, absorbed without consequence, because the picture has decided that consequence is a tonal problem.

I laugh at this film and then feel a little cheated for laughing. Blanchett gets four minutes for the best idea in the picture, That waste outweighs any of the jokes. Waititi’s gifts are real, and I wish somebody at the studio had told him Odin’s death was allowed to hurt.

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6. Black Panther (2018)

► Read the full review of Black Panther (2018)

“Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from the ships.”

The best-written villain in the franchise sits in a film that’s otherwise conventional, and the gap between those two facts is the whole assessment.

Killmonger is right about the diagnosis. Wakanda hid, had the means to help and chose not to, and the film lets him say so without correction. Michael B. Jordan plays a man whose rage is inherited and specific, and his final line about the ocean is the strongest single moment in the phase.

The film around him is a standard succession plot with two ritual combats, a chase, and a third act that resolves in armored rhinos and a CGI fight between two men in similar suits. The subject is far better than the structure built around it.

The production design is the achievement, and a real one. Ruth Carter’s costume work and Hannah Beachler’s Wakanda are built from specific real traditions and not from a generic idea of the future, and the result is the most distinctive-looking film of the phase.

What the film can’t resolve is that Killmonger’s plan is monstrous and his diagnosis is correct, so it defeats him physically and never answers him. T’Challa’s eventual position, opening outreach centers, is a policy response to an argument about centuries, and the gap between those two scales is where the picture stops working.

My 5 is lower than the reputation and it’s about execution and not subject. Two identical suits fighting in a tunnel, rendered rhinos, and a villain who has to be killed and not answered aren’t what a film with this much on its mind deserved.

I wanted to like this film more than I do. Killmonger’s last line about the ocean moves me, and the sets and costumes are a joy to look at. Then the rhinos show up, and I’m watching a design team and one actor carry a script that didn’t trust its own argument.

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7. Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

► Read the full review of Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

“Fun isn’t something one considers when balancing the universe.”

The point where the convergence becomes the product. Twenty-two films of setup deliver a single event, and the film has no time to be about anything because it’s servicing arrivals. Thanos is given the emotional center and it doesn’t survive examination. His plan is arithmetic that fails on its own terms, and the film asks the audience to accept a genocidal position as tragic conviction by giving him a sacrifice scene with a character he’d abused.

Its strength is momentum. The film moves, the Titan sequence is well staged, and the ending has shock value the first time. What it lacks is a protagonist. Ask whose story this is and it belongs to the schedule.

The Titan material is the best hour because it’s the only stretch with a plan in it. Six people who have never met working out how to remove a glove is an actual problem with an actual method, and the sequence is legible from beginning to end.

Thanos as written requires the audience not to think about the plan, and the film knows this. That’s why nobody in it is permitted to make the obvious objection. A being who can restructure reality and chooses population reduction is either stupid or the story isn’t really about resources, and the picture can’t afford to examine either possibility.

The 4 reflects a film that’s superbly assembled and about nothing. Every character arrives, does the thing the audience expects, and departs. It’s the most efficient delivery mechanism the franchise built, and efficiency is what it’s instead of a subject.

I find this film cold, and the demand that I weep for Thanos is a stretch. He abuses a daughter and then the movie wants my sympathy because the sacrifice hurts him. The Titan hour is fun. The rest feels to me like standing on a train platform watching arrivals I’ve been told to cheer.

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8. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

► Read the full review of Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

“Do you guys just put the word quantum in front of everything?”

Released two months after Infinity War with no acknowledgement of it until a credits scene. That’s the clearest demonstration of what a fixed schedule does to a shared story. The plot is a series of pursuits over a portable laboratory, with three separate parties chasing the same object and none of them wanting anything the audience can care about. Ghost is an interesting idea, a person in constant pain who needs something the protagonists have, and the film treats her as an obstacle. The size gags remain the best thing on offer and there aren’t enough of them to carry two hours.

Michelle Pfeiffer arrives in the last twenty minutes as a woman who has spent thirty years alone in a place where time doesn’t work, and the film gives her about six lines. It’s the clearest case in the phase of a strange idea being used as a plot destination. The San Francisco chase has the phase’s best practical gag work, with a building that becomes luggage and a car chase where the vehicles change size mid-corner. Peyton Reed can direct this material and the script keeps interrupting it for exposition about the quantum realm.

Even a 4 is generous and reflects the craft instead of the intent. Nothing in it is badly made. It simply had no reason to exist in the release slot it occupied, and the film opens with a scene that pretends the previous month didn’t happen.

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9. Captain Marvel (2019)

► Read the full review of Captain Marvel (2019)

“I have nothing to prove to you.”

The weakest film of the phase and the point where the introduction becomes the entire purpose of a project. The structure is the problem. She begins the film powerful, spends it recovering memories instead of developing, and ends it more powerful. That isn’t an arc. A protagonist who’s told she’s been held back, and then stops being held back, has undergone no decision the audience watched her make. The 1990s setting is decoration, the Skrull reversal is the one good idea and arrives too late to reorganize anything, and the film exists primarily to place a character on the board before the next Avengers picture needs her.

The Skrull material deserved the whole film. Refugees mischaracterized as infiltrators by the power that displaced them is a real premise, Ben Mendelsohn plays it with more warmth than anything else in the picture has, and it arrives with forty minutes left.

The buddy structure with Fury is the only part that works consistently, and it works because Samuel L. Jackson is playing a younger man who’s not yet certain of anything. That’s a version of the character nobody had seen.

This film is a bore. A hero who never makes a choice I get to watch her make gives me nothing to hold, and the Skrull story was the better picture and the film buried it under an introduction anyway. Jackson and Mendelsohn deserved a script. What’s left is a placeholder with a two-hour running time.

This site rates it at minus one thousand out of ten. That isn’t a position on a scale so much as a refusal to engage with one. What the number is registering is a film whose protagonist begins powerful, recovers information instead of developing, and ends more powerful, wrapped around an introduction that a later film had already been scheduled to need.

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10. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

► Read the full review of Avengers: Endgame (2019)

“I am inevitable.”

Three hours of retrieval, and the structural decision at the center of it is the one that costs everything: the heist through previous films.

Revisiting old scenes converts the franchise into a museum of itself. The pleasure on offer is recognition and not story, and the sequence is enormously effective at that and does nothing to advance anybody.

The last forty minutes deliver two earned moments, Rogers with the hammer and Stark’s final line, and around them is an enormous battle in which nothing is legible and nobody is in danger the audience believes in. Undoing a death that a previous film spent its whole length establishing is the decision that makes the stakes retroactively negotiable, and the franchise has never recovered from it.

The first hour is the best material and nobody talks about it. Five years after a total defeat, with the survivors running support groups and Thor drunk in a fishing village, is an interesting premise, and the film abandons it within forty minutes for a mechanism. The time heist also does something worse than nostalgia. It establishes that the past is a place these characters can visit, which retroactively makes every loss in the franchise a logistics problem instead of a fact, and no subsequent film has been able to close that door.

Two moments and an hour of setup earn the 4. Stark’s death is earned across eleven years and it’s followed by a funeral that works. Everything between the first hour and the last twenty minutes is a franchise cataloguing itself.

This is the one where I stopped trusting the franchise. The moment the past became a place you could visit, every loss I’d been asked to care about for eleven years turned into a scheduling issue, and I resent that. Stark’s goodbye moves me. It shouldn’t have had to carry three hours of a franchise admiring its own scrapbook.

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11. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

► Read the full review of Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

“You’ll see. People need to believe. And nowadays, they’ll believe anything.”

A better film than its position suggests, and the one that’s aged into relevance faster than anything else in the phase. Mysterio is a disgruntled former employee running a fabricated threat with staged evidence, and Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man who has worked out that a convincing performance beats a true account. The illusion sequence is the best visual set piece in the phase.

It also handles the aftermath of Endgame better than Endgame did. A world where half the population returned to find five years gone is a strange premise, and the school assembly video handles it in ninety seconds with more wit than the previous film managed in three hours.

Gyllenhaal plays two things at once. Beck as a mentor is warm and convincing, and Beck as a former Stark employee explaining his grievance to a room of technicians is better still, played with the exact energy of a man pitching a deck he believes in. The drone illusion sequence is the phase’s most inventive set piece and one of the few where the effects are doing something a story requires instead of filling a running time. A hero who can’t trust what he’s looking at is a real problem to solve.

The 6 is about what surrounds those elements. The European tour structure is thin, the school comedy and the espionage plot never combine, and the film ends on a mid-credits scene that’s more consequential than anything in its actual third act.